Man Charged with Bringing Down Police E-Mail Network

A man from West Australia faces charges of allegedly flooding spam mails to networks of the Western Australia (WA) and New South Wales (NSW) police. The accused is scheduled to arrive in Rockingham Magistrates Court on charges of two instances of unauthorized damage to data stored in computer systems, as reported by perthnow on April 10, 2008.

The accused, a 22-year-old man from Cooloongup, South of Perth, is charged for bombarding police e-mail systems with several thousands of messages that collapsed the e-mail network of the NSW Police. The attack also led to a major breakdown in the WA Police e-mail that also brought down the Commissioner's own e-mail. The man also faces two charges of impairing computer data.

Besides, the accused allegedly uploaded onto a Canadian site, a message addressed to the local police and then sent out the message as spam targeting specific e-mail addresses of the police department through botnets. These massive volumes of e-mail clogged the e-mail servers at the police quarters.

Spokesman, Ian Hasleby, on behalf of the police said that the accused man distributed a large number of spam mails from his various residential locations and workplaces to Karl O'Callaghan, WA Police Commissioner in his Blackberry and work computer, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald on April 10, 2008.

The spokesman also said that the WA Computer Crime Squad carried out a detailed and complex probe into the e-mail barrage that lasted for two weeks together with the NSW Police Computer Crime Squad, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Squad also carried out an international hunt for the culprit from January 28 to February 18, 2008.

Moreover, phishing, which involves spam mails, shows how the problem is growing with escalated costs to consumers and banks amounting to billions of dollars every year. Recently in India, the Crime Unit of Delhi Police uncovered an illegal money laundering operation on the Internet through phishing on April 10, 2008. The culprits were an ex-BPO worker and two Nigerian nationals who stole Rs.33.5 Lakhs from a number of bank accounts across the country.